America at Large: W P Kinsella's body of baseball literature

In The Dixon-Cornbelt League, a college baseball prospect fetches up at a minor league club in Grand Mound, Iowa, a remote Midwestern town where every meal ends in cherry pie and courting couples nuzzle on porch swings. Locals revere the team and over-zealous host families aspire to marry eligible daughters off to the players. Eventually, the newly-arrived second baseman realises there's something peculiar about this pastoral idyll. They never play competitive games. Ever.

Turns out this is a corner of the sporting universe reserved for those unfortunates who have all the talent but can’t come through in the clutch. Cursed with ability that deserts them once the pressure is on, these young men are fated to end up here, playing eternal practice games where they never feel the strain and always excel. The conceit will resonate with anybody who has watched, played or, more especially, failed at sport, and, in this respect, it’s classic WP Kinsella.

Following his death through doctor-assisted suicide at the age of 81 in Canada last Friday, most retrospectives have focused on Field of Dreams, the Kevin Costner movie of Kinsella's far superior novel Shoeless Joe. And with good reason. Despite a critical panning upon release in 1989, the sentimental yarn about a cash-strapped farmer carving a baseball diamond out of an Iowa cornfield so long-dead icons can play catch in his backyard has morphed into a cherished swatch of Americana, replete with its own catchphrase: "If you build it, he will come."

Four decades after Kinsella first wrote a short story version of the tale, families still make pilgrimages to the location where it was filmed. They come to toss balls and run the bases where Costner reunited with his estranged father, and Shoeless Joe Jackson and the rest of the disgraced Chicago Black Sox of 1919 finally returned to the sport from which they were banned for life. Some visitors merely want to sit in the bleachers where JD Salinger (he became Terence Mann in the movie when the reclusive author threatened legal action) delivered one of the great soliloquys about the game's place in the American psyche.

‘Marked time’

“I don’t have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball,” says Salinger. “America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what once was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins.”

A snippet of a wondrous couple of pages that, ironically, showcases how the Canadian-born Kinsella so exquisitely captured baseball’s heady brew of nostalgia, ritual and romance. A late-comer to literature, Kinsella published 27 books, including novels, collections of short stories, non-fiction and poetry. Although he touched on many subjects baseball was a fecund seam he mined to terrific effect again and again throughout his career.

Unique understanding

A sampling of some of the stories illustrates his unique understanding of sport and what it reveals about people and society.

The Eddie Scissons Syndrome

is about a man who has traded for years on the falsehood that he’s the oldest living Chicago Cub but it’s really the story of all of us who have ever exaggerated our athletic exploits. In

Searching for January

the late Roberto Clemente walks out of the sea 15 years after his death in a plane crash, discovers how much the world and the game he bestrode has changed, and opts to return to the water in search of peace.

Of course, none of the stories are just about baseball. Collectively, his canon stands as a vivid portrait of rural America, a landscape and lifestyle under threat and undergoing transformation, sometimes willing, more times not, for much of the past half century.

Kinsella's brand of magic realism isn't for everybody. In The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, his bizarre follow-up to Shoeless Joe, a game sprawls for 2000 innings over 40 days and an eclectic roster includes Leonardo da Vinci, a moving Black Angel statue, and a Native American called "Drifting Away". Still, his particular genius was a mesmeric knack for taking different elements of baseball's abundant lore and delightfully skewing them.

In The Last Pennant Before Armageddon, the USA and the Soviet Union are on the brink of the Third World War just as the cursed Cubs finally look like they are about to win their first World Series since 1908. Their manager Al Tiller begins having visions warning that if he leads his team to victory it will spark the nuclear apocalypse. He must choose between making or ending history.

When the playoffs start next month, this year's Cubs are favoured to win it all just days before the United States could potentially elect Donald Trump as president. The Last Pennant Before Armageddon? Kinsella called it.